March 2020 | delta.com
COVID-19 hit our studio hard. Delta's priorities, and the priorities of their travel industry partners shifted hard in March of 2020, seemingly overnight. Our brief here was to take the slowdown as an opportunity to build the tools we wished we had, but were always moving too quickly to build.
AKQA is the digital agency of record for Delta. At AKQA, we design for all of Delta's digital channels. That includes what you'd expect from most brands these days, a website, a mobile app. But for Delta that also includes digital channels specific to travel, Wifi Portals and In Flight Entertainment on the planes themselves, internal tools to keep operations running smoothly for Delta support agents, and Gate Information Displays and Self-service Kiosks at the airport.
Kiosk screens are updated with a lot less frequency than Dotcom or Fly Delta, so we got into a bit of a legacy design pickle over the last few years. UI tools like Sketch and now Figma deposed long reigning granddaddy of web design "Photoshop" (anybody have any idea why we hacked Photoshop into doing web design instead of giving Adobe Fireworks a chance?) All our Kiosk assets lay in the catacombs of PSDs. The occasional quick ask for Kiosk resulted in a few one-off screens given new life in Figma, but we could see that any future overhauls of Kiosk would require a lot of legwork to move into Figma.
This is a Kiosk
Time + Foresight = Kiosk Toolkit. <3
We kept this slim, just me digging for Photoshop files, rebuilding 134 screens with the fresh Figma components, user testing the usability of the library with designers new to the team & new to Figma.
This is just a picture of Figma because Delta doesn't love to design out in the open nearly as much as I do.
